God in the Dock

I am listening to the book – “C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock”(Eerdmans: 1970). The excerpt below caught my attention and I wanted to share it as a way to learn and understand it better.

The idea: We sometimes cannot see something for what it is, because we are too close or it is to big to grasp the full view, so we sometimes need to see it in a scaled down model form. That is the role Jesus plays in relation to God. It is not a new thought totally – I have heard the expression “you sometimes cannot see the forest through the trees”. What is new or provoking is the application to God.

God is performing miracles all the time (like turning water into wine through nature). The role of Jesus is to be that scaled down miracle worker to help us grasp the big picture. Also, the stories of Jesus going around healing – they help us see that God does the healing all the time . The first aid dressing on a cut or wound does not do the healing – cuts heal themselves through God’s design. Here is the passage that I found on another blog:

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities.Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit, Bacchus or Dionysus: or else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our senses can discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off’ (John 5:19). The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.